But now there is, because I've been seriously playing Half Life 2.
I don't really like it.
IMHO it's just a dull, repetitive tech demo. I'm sick of the following:
-> Getting stuck on the scenery (partly fixed by the Gravity Gun, but it's still irritating)
-> Poor level design - ledges that are too narrow to walk on without being 100% accurate, and jumps that you can miss (thus killing oneself) by simply being as little as 1mm further back than the game wants you to be.
-> The clumsy controls.
-> The "LOADING" moving from one room to another - never seen that in anything over than the HL series.
-> The endless tide of near invincible monsters, causing your whole ammo to deplete just by trying to kill them. Headshots aren't always terribly effective.
-> Highway 17 (the driving mission) - don't get me started.
-> The general hellish boredom and chore of going through the game.
I got the original Half Life off Steam, and didn't like it either, but at least it was so bad it was good, and also had some comedy value - HL2 lacks anything. It's one outlandish advert for a graphics engine, as far as I can see. I'm glad to see that, in the UK at least (not sure about everywhere else), Valve have taken the sensible step of selling CS Source separate from HL2. Very wise move, I'd say.
At this point, I tend to think that the single player FPS campaigns aren't for me, unless they're mindless fragfests like the older Quake games and UT. I didn't like Quake IV much, either - I liked Quake because it was different to Doom, but that's no longer the case.
Bah. I really don't think single player FPS is for me - it's online play for me, balanced out with a healthy dose of RTS.
Another random thought which crossed my mind - the medium on which games are distributed. I remember a discussion a while ago on a different forum, where Americans were complaining about the number of discs their games were coming on. I believe UT2K4 had 6 discs, BF2 had 3, HL2 had quite a few...
I wondered, why do they do it? In the UK, basically all new AAA releases are on DVD these days, I've never seen a game with multiple CD-ROMs in the last 3-4 years at least, yet it seems elsewhere that it's a common occurence.
Anyway, not much else to report, except that I've not posted any noob programming questions lately.
Oh, and I found this quite amusing. Wonder if that'll satisfy any conspiracists?
I don't own Half-Life 2, but I played it when I visited my brother back in Melbourne a year ago. I liked it a bit, but it seemed a bit too linearly scripted for me (even more than HL1). I prefered the "lone soldier" aspect of the first one, I think. I spent most of my time running through the game playing with the gravity gun and not taking it seriously. Although it was cool defeating a platoon of soldiers with nothing more than a matress [smile].
Actually, the one thing that bugs me the most with Half-Life 2 is that for Half-Life 1 I constructed an elaborate backstory in my mind for Gordon Freeman based on a baby photo in his locker at the start of the game; Gordon was fighting to make his way back to his wife and newborn child. Then in HL2 they introduce this low-level romantic sub-plot with Alyx that didn't work with my backstory at all. In my mind, Gordon was still trying to find a way to go back in time to his wife and child. Of course, I'm probably the only person who played HL2 who has that complaint [grin].